I’ve been reading and hearing a lot of rumbling lately from designers lately desperately looking for a better way to add fonts to their web design.

I feel that there is a lot of confusion in the design and web developer community as to what the issues are with font embedding or linking and when there isn’t confusion I often find myself on the opposite side of the debate and end up at a impasse with whoever I am talking with. In the past month I have found myself in this position more than once in person.

Last week I was posting a response on MildFuzz (link) and I realized that just debating the technical merits of the problem and proposed solutions isn’t going to get me anywhere. I set out to write a blog post to express my positions and beliefs and explain the technical problems to people but as I was writing I realized that there is just too much to dump into a single blog post.

My goal here is to write a long multi-part post that frames the technical issues, talks about proposed solutions, touches on the debates going on in the community, and offers my thoughts on a solution to the problem. This first post will just be an introduction.

first. About me:
I have been working as a professional web and application developer for 11 years now. Before that I did some type design and released several commercial and free fonts over at GrilledCheese.com. While the site may appear very very stale, I have been working for months now updating all of my typefaces and preparing them for a re-release. (Cleaning up glyphs that are over 10 years old and converting to OpenType is quite a chore, not to mention the 10 or so unfinished works I never released). I am most likely going to release most of my typefaces as Creative Commons licensed works or some hybrid commercial entity that I will talk about in a later article. Since I am now a professional programmer and not a designer I tend to look at things from more of a technical perspective and that will probably come through in this writing.

here is an outline of the posts I am working on

  • A brief history of type and fonts
  • The type industry compared to other creative works
  • Type on the web – methods and controversy
  • My proposed solution